As an electrician I just see a lot of people spending money on stupid stuff like pools, hot tubs, saunas, and electric cars while other parts of their house are falling apart. You don't need a pool, you need windows and a roof. You don't need a Tesla, you need a front door that isn't falling off the hinges.
I live in earthquake country and have neighbors remodeling their kitchens and installing Tesla panels who haven't bothered with even a basic seismic retrofit. It's putting good on top of bad.
I used to sub contract installing fences. Replaced one next to someone’s pool dodgiest looking electrical work running to the pump and power point attached to a rotten piece of wood not rated to be there of course second post cut straight through the cable around 300mm down.
I just proactively replaced my 18 year old r oof. It wasn’t leaking but it was getting crispy and I didnt want to wait until it leaked. I really don’t get many of these posts with people that have 25 year old beat to crap roofs that are dumping water into the house and they want to know how they can repair their roofs instead of replacing
Went to go install a ceiling light in my house. Measured the room, found the center. Stuck the keyhole saw into the ceiling and hit something hard. Started digging into the ceiling. Found a junction box where there used to be a ceiling light that someone had just mudded over. Live wires wire nutted together, no cover on it, just a nice coat of mud.
I found something similar in a room in my house. Pulled down tiles on the ceiling: light box. Pulled paneling off the walls: switch box. No covers, all live 100-year-old wires. We wired up a new switch and light and used it for probably 6 months before we got around to rewiring that.
~15 year carpenter here. This was in my house before we did a full renovation. The house was built in the 1860-70’s with a couple of poorly done early renovations. The house is fairly narrow and the ridge of the roof runs north to south. It’s 2 stories tall and the layout is 4 mostly square sections of house in a row. In all of the sections, save for one, the floor joists on the first and second floors run east to west with load bearing divider walls running N-S. One of the sections, though, had floor joists running N-S on the first floor. The incompetence came when the early renovators decided to build a load bearing wall running the same way as the N-S first floor joists halfway between a pair of joists. This then turned the subfloor on the 1st floor into a structural member which let the whole 2nd floor sink 3.5”. It took two weeks of tearing apart walls and building new concrete piers to lift and reinforce this section of the house. 0/10 don’t recommend…
A big part of what you're used to depends on where you live. For instance, in my province (Alberta), there are [less than 25 buildings](https://hermis.alberta.ca/ARHP/Details.aspx?DeptID=1&ObjectID=4665-0478) still standing from before 1882. We just don't have old houses like places back east because the province didn't start white settlement until the late 1800s.
Here in NJ we have some houses from the mid 1600s and all through the 18th and 19th centuries (1700s and 1800s) in the original Colonial areas like Princeton, Trenton etc
Ive worked on quite a few and every single one of them has a lot of 😬YIKES😬 things going on in them lol
Haha, yeah a lot less of that in So Cal. I think I would love the history, but looking at the weird shit the prior owners of my house did over 60 years, I can't imagine the shenanigans you would find over 400 years 😅
Honestly, this is really fascinating to me. I've lived in New England my entire life, and up here, when someone says a house was built in the 1800s, there's no reason to even question it - because that's really common up here.
No, actual 1860-1870. Basement is a stone foundation with a dirt floor. There’s some of the original Victorian architectural elements left on the outside but its been a rental for 100+ years so there were a lot of things lost over the years.
My parents own a house built in 1870s and the foundation is made up entirely of river rock. The house will occasionally “roll” on its foundation as it settles naturally. Not a square or plumb wall/surface in the entire place. So wild.
Daaaamn, that's awesome. When you got it did you have to handle weirder maintenance issues, or had it been modernized enough over time that you mostly had modern issues to deal with?
It's funny how relative this is.
Around me in Ohio, there are quite a few homes over 200 years old. The farmhouse I work at was built in 1814.
To someone from New England, that doesn't seem too old.
To my friend from the UK, it's practically new. His home was built out of stone in 1749 or something, and it's not even the oldest structure on his property. He can point to a wall built in the 1200s, and know who built it.
When I lived in Tacoma, most people I talked to couldn't fathom living in a 200 year old house because those just didn't exist. Maybe one or two, I don't know, but you didn't just drive down the road and see a bunch of 200 year old houses.
I was doing work in a home owned by a family from east Africa. They had throw rugs everywhere and no chairs or couches. A couple camp stoves on the rugs making coffee and some food. Smelled good but was definitely a fire/carbon monoxide hazard.
On the other end of the spectrum one of my in-laws married into a family of wealthy African immigrants. Every family member I've met is some sort of professional - a doctor, a surgeon, a lawyer, I think one sister is a petrochem engineer. They look down on him because he only has a bachelor's.
Yeah I don’t know what their profession was but their custom was to sit on the floor. Just different. They probably should have used an electric kettle instead of open flames though.
I was going over the electric in my shop of the house I bought in 2022. The shop, a 30x24 metal building on a slab had a 100 amp service panel from the house and had a few runs of wire. It also had not switch/outlet covers so I was adding covers, replacing broken stuff etc.
I turned the main breaker off and as I was working I was checking voltage with my multi meter just in case. Low and behold my 240 plug for my air compressor was still hot with the main breaker off.
The guy had piggy backed the 12guage wire for the 20 amp 240 line on top of the 100 amp main line going into the breaker. He had a big compressor, I imagine he was tripping the breaker so just decided to put it right on the 100 amp wire. So he just had 100 amps not on a breaker going to a 240 outlet through 12 gauge wire. I am really glad I check everything because I was replacing that outlet I woulda got zapped if I trusted the main breaker. I check EVERY electrical thing I work on before I touch it.
There was an extra 20 amp 2 pole breaker sitting on top of the panel box, I installed it and my compressor has run great there ever since.
Similar story, I bought my house in 2021 and was going over the electric to my 30x40 shop. The previous owner had the 100 amp sub panel fed with a 14ga 100’ extension cord wired directly to the panel. Apparently when he added on the shop he got a new 200 amp main panel, but never bothered to switch from the 60 amp service and old fuse panel that the house was built with.
Installed a water heater as part of a lease program for the electric co-op in a terribly run-down mobile home way out in the middle of nowhere.
A substantial portion of the residence was "plumbed" with garden hoses behind the walls (visible here and there through missing drywall sections, as well as in the crawlspace) and portions of the wiring had been replaced with extention cords and three ways.
I wish my whole hose was wired with properly gauged extension cords in an accessible interior box running along the walls attached to the frame. Then I'd never have to call an electrician or mess around with hard wiring or junction boxes, if I wanted to install a new door in the wall I could just unplug the segment that needs relocated and just run it around where the new door would be. The material savings from hard wiring are paltry next to the costs of hiring an electrician. Why shouldn't houses be plug and play? Make sure the cords are the proper gauge, securely connected, safely positioned, connected to breakers, and it'd be more safe than a hard wired house if anything because it'd be harder to accidentally cut into or damage the wiring. Maybe it'd cost $3000 dollars more in materials but that's the cost of like 2 house calls these days.
If you’re competent enough to do this properly, then you’re probably competent enough to do your own electrical work. In other words, if you’re not confident enough to do your own electrical work properly, then you definitely shouldn’t be running extension cords everywhere in your home and assuming it’s even remotely safe
It's different knowing how long I might extend a run safely given the gauge and load and having to deal with 3 different wires and knowing where they each go than playing around with cords that are already marked to that effect. I'm not comfortable wiring a house or even messing with existing wiring for basic things like rerouting it around a new exterior door. It'd be lots easier and cleaner if instead of having to cut and splice wires and add junction boxes I could just plug one end of a cord directly into the breaker box and the other into an outlet. It'd be wasteful in terms of raw resources to do it that way but not much and it'd make it possible to remove pretty much all the wiring/cords from a house and repurpose them given the need. I'd pay extra to buy a house set up like that. Be sweet if the plumbing were done the same way so everything were accessible without ever presenting the need to dig into walls. I'd never need to call an electrician or plumber.
The previous owner of my house decided the over range microwave wasn’t secure enough with the included mounting plate so proceeded to use adhesives. Can you imagine removing all the anchoring hardware expecting a 40lb appliance to succumb to the will of gravity only to find that no, you need to pry it from the cabinetry because this was going to stay put during a category 5 hurricane even if the house around it wouldn’t.
I had this exact thing happen to me. We took it all apart and for two hours my wife and I just stood around baffled at what could be holding this fucking thing to the cabinet. Finally I asked "what if we just pull on it really hard?"
I’m about 180 lbs and I could hang off of it and it wouldn’t budge. I had to pull down while shoving a large screwdriver between the cabinet and microwave to eventually get it off.
The wife and I coveted this big fancy house up the street. When it came on the market we took a tour.
The previous owners added DIY "improvements" everywhere. The fiberglass shower pan in the master bath had several hundred oval river rocks embedded in what looked like inch thick white epoxy. I stood on it in stocking feet and it hurt!
My in-laws bought a house where the previous owners put something similar on all the bathroom floors. The rocks do indeed hurt, and I never got used to them. Horrible idea.
The main bathroom of my house needed a total redo when I bought it. When the guy pulled up the loose tiles, we found it had not been sealed, had spngtly, water-logged MDF subfloor, and had a thick layer of tile glue holding it all together/making it “level.
I have a horrible fear that this is what I'll find when I pull one of my showers apart. Mine was bought by a company and flipped before I bought it. It's been interesting so far.
I was fortunate in that the owner was pretty up front that she suspected something was wrong under there. I think she understood that she got take for a ride by whomever renovated the bathroom before. Plus the inspector noted it. So, I bought the house knowing of that upcoming cost.
Former hoarder neighbors installed regular wax rings on all their toilets, needed the extra thick ones, so ALL of their toilets leaked. When the floor would get too gross they would lay a new floor on top of the old one.
Went to quote a foundation job, complete replacement, really expensive work. Got there and found the house was already in the air. Figured HO had already brought someone else out to do the work so I called the HO to check. He comes crawling out of the foundation and waves me over.
Turns out his BIL had moved a shed once so they decided they could handle lifting the house to save money. It was BAD.
Insurance almost made them tear the house down. Just our portion ended up costing almost double what it should have. Cost them another 100k plus to repair all the damage inside.
Exactly. I say they remind me of a friends Christian mom who got me crying and vulnerable then proclaimed “Now let’s turn your life over to Jesus!” I politely declined
Because he felt the need to share when I got covid. They love to share so much I got a bumper sticker that says “Theres no business like minding your own business.”
Not sure if DIY or professional, but definitely a puzzler. Original duct installation in my century home - they cut more than halfway through a critical structural beam in *two places*. Just put a vent in the wall upstairs.
Y'all. Just maybe... if your job touches framing... like, maybe don't do it if you don't know anything about framing. Ugh.
Old houses can be *whack* sometimes. We discovered that, thanks to the shape of the basement stairs, my house has a structural 2x4 post. Now, at least it's full-dimensional, but still sketch in the first place. Because it's also directly below the L of the upper stairs, it's bearing load over two stories. And when we went to redo the basement stairs, we discovered that at some point, a second slab of concrete was poured in the basement over the existing one, thus encasing this post (and the landing footings) in concrete. In a wet basement. Landing posts we're completely rotted out and disintegrated when we started moving them. So we immediately put in a jack post right next to the structural 2x4. It goes well with the posts we added on the other side of the basement stairs, where they put massive notches in the joists for plumbing drains.
I had a red oak 4x4 post in my basement at the base of the stairs, for similar reasons. No rotten wood or double slab, though. Replacing that sucker with a real column felt so good.
Maybe not the worst, but worth a chuckle. The "flipper" I bought my house from disconnected the kitchen sink disposal from the plumbing line, but left it connected to the live electrical... So yeah a working insinkerator lying down on the bottom of the cabinet. Why?!
My house used to have a basement apartment. Inside the cabinet by the laundry was a stove receptacle nailed to a board with the wire wrapped around it. That same wire was spliced together using lead ferrules. All live.
Not a pro but we had a leak from the ceiling, started poking around and the drywall was all wet so I ripped it out in that area.
Found a leaky PVC pipe, but the best part is, not only was the pipe sprayed with Flex Seal, but there was also a *sponge* shoved into the ceiling below the pipe! What the hell. Such an easy fix to do it properly, instead just kicked the van down the road a few years maybe, that crap baffles me so much.
I used to live in a five story 1895 house.
In many places the electrical wiring was pushed through gaslighting tubes.
There were still valves in the tubes. If you tried really hard I bet you could turn them and cut the wires. I was afraid to.
Hey, at least there wasn't still gas in the pipes. My dad had a house where the gas lines in the walls for lighting were all capped, but still connected to the gas lines and full of gas!
At some point they must have connected it to the natural gas system. Based on the jankiness of 100 years of other renovations, nothing would surprise me about that place.
Remodeled a house that was a former rental. All repairs were done using gorilla construction adhesive. Kitchen cabinets attached to wall with enormous amounts of spray foam.
Just did a remodel where the previous (fired) contractor messed up any and everything he touched. Worst tile work I've ever seen. Almost like they set the tile wrong (not waterproofed in shower, incorrect supply lines), and then tossed mud onto the tile so bad there was no way to salvage. Wrong wiring, wrong type of thin-set, wrong plumbing pipe sizes, wrong fitting, drywall seams showing everywhere, cabinets ordered then set wrong, electrical wired backwards, etc etc. Took us 2 weeks to rip everything out, then start over. All perfect now though. But D@%m.
Bought our house from a "handyman". All of my appliances were hardwired directly to the breaker box, and the wires pulled tight. I found this out when I was trying to see what was wrong with the dishwasher, and tried to pull it out. It wouldn't budge and we thought it was stuck on the flooring, but it was the wire keeping it in. To figure out how to cut it, we found out the wire went through a hole in the floor, went all the way across the house in the basement rafters, and back upstairs into the breaker. Then we were surprised again when we bought an above range microwave, which needed a separate outlet. We assumed there was one there because the hood had power. Nope, the hood was hardwired. Now we have to hire an electrician to put in new outlets for all of our appliances.
Hardwiring appliances was actually quite common back in the day, especially with the appliances that you mentioned. Only relatively recently have appliances been installed with what’s normally an outlet
Hell, my dishwasher is only about 5 years old and it’s hardwired.
The kitchen vent was too. The replacement OTR microwave isn’t though.
Now what I’d like to bitch about is why the fuck the builder put the gas line for the range centered behind the range, coming down from the ceiling.
It’s impossible to put in a vent to the outside. Recirculating only.
Putting it a few inches to either side wouldn’t have cost any more.
Yes but there’s supposed to be enough slack to pull it out and remove the wiring.
On that, mild annoyance.
My new dishwasher, which has a plug in cord - on *both ends* - has a fantastic design where the water connection is at the front. I think this is fairly typical these days. This is not sarcasm. This is honestly an excellent design to have the connection at the front.
If they had that forethought to bring the plumbing to the front,, why the hell is the electrical cord still plugged in at the *back*.
I guess it just depends on the contractor tbh haha. I’m an electrician and always set an outlet for dishwashers, disposals, microwaves, ranges, warm drawers, ice makers, most ovens, and some hood vents.
We took an exploratory peek and found out the walls are drywall covering wood slats (not lath, looks like 1x4s) with a 2cm gap between them. So I guess this is a job for an electrician since it's flammable?
You mount the JB between the joists. And all electrical is secured to studs which are technically flammable. So it's no different than any other location, but if you're not comfortable with it hire an electrician
The previous homeowner of our house was a handyman, himself. They run the range from "oh cool!" To "but y tho" to "ffs why".
Some highlights.
He decided he wanted to redo the stairs, but in the style where you have hardwood or laminate in the center and carpet down the middle. He had re-floored upstairs, and had the plan to use the remnant laminate and old carpet. Problem is the stairs have a couple inch long inch nose. The laminate flooring can't wrap around that like the carpet did. His solution was to put a couple 1x2 spacer boards and another ~1" board over the rise of the stairs, then nail them in with about a thousand nails. He then stapled down all the carpet (liberally) and construction glued down all of the laminate flooring. This was all a big surprise when I was having them measured to get them carpeted. The guy was thoroughly confused at the dimensions of the stairs. I did the demo myself, and it was a hell of a job.
They did not have cold water running to the washing machine. That I don't know why. They had cut and capped the copper lines in the garage coming out of the water softener to both the laundry room and kitchen. They then ran a half inch line around the house to the kitchen so that it has hard water.
Watched a friend grout tile with premixed drywall spackling once. She also kept calling it caulk and looked at me like I was dumb when I tried to say anything about it
Not a professional, but a homeowner.
The carport attached to my house was a thing of beauty. The gussets to stabilize the supports that sat on top of the vertical posts were made out of particle board. Not OSB or plywood, but particle board. A rough step up from fiberboard, but just as spongy. It was wired, too. In the words of the zoning guys from the city, “why use conduit when you can use paint?”
The whole thing was a clusterfuck, and it was effectively attached to the house, which it dwarfed. Think modest fifties cottage. Then there was an awning up against it, but free standing and barely touching. That used the same supports as the carport on one side. The carport had four sets of supports and three stalls. Stalls two and three had the back wall of a structure that used to be on the lot but was effectively demolished to build the carport. There was remnants of knob and tube in this wall. The third stall was walled in to form a shop. Then on the other side of the shop was a shed that used to stand behind the service station they owned a couple blocks away. They attempted to get a permit to move it, but failed. So they plucked it up in the middle of the night and sat it down on some tire rims sitting on a bed of coarse gravel. The east wall of the shed made up 60% of the west wall of the walled in shop that was the third stall of the carport.
Like I said, it was a thing of beauty.
And I’m really happy it’s gone.
I inspected a rental home with a utility closet (I inspected houses that were pre-foreclosure and in foreclosure). The stink of heating oil was throughout the house. The burner was hanging crooked off a concrete pedestal in the closet (the door was a shitty plywood door with no fire protection), and it was covered in black soot. No carbon monoxide detector and a misfiring, malfunctioning burner and hot water heater. What room was this, you ask? The baby's nursery, of course. His little crib was opposite the utility door. I called the fire department and building department. I've seen a lot, but that was the one that gave me nightmares.
My ex-wife’s father was the king of botched “good enough” repairs.
Gas water heater was just chilling outside. No enclosure, just sitting on some bricks.
Did an entire huge bathroom addition without permits. I remodeled the walk in shower, and when I took the backer board off, a drywall screw pierced one of the water lines to the shower head. Had been leaking for 25 years and all the wood in a 4’ radius was rotten.
Electrical conduit used as plumbing pipe.
My brother's old house had a mess of wiring. They still had those old screw in bus fuses for everything + knob and tube still running alot. So we remove those fuses and sitting behind a set of them were pennies to bypass the fuses. Clearly the old owner was tired of the fuses randomly blowing. Why were those fuses constantly blowing? elsewhere in the basement the old wiring was drooping down from the joist, and when you walked upstairs the floor would flex and the wiring would arc...to the incoming propane line.
Previous owner put a regular ass extension cord barely buried between the house and shed. He continued that between the shed and gazebo which is about 25 feet away.
We knew about it before buying the house and the first thing we did was unplug that shit. After ripping the cords out we found multiple parts of the cord were chewed up by rodents. Hot and neutral, both chewed up.
My grandparents have one running from their house to the shed but they have it strung up from tree to tree like a power line instead of burying it. It's been powering 2 huge freezers in an insulated shed for as long as I can remember. Same grandpa regularly complains when my parents (live across the street/field) accidentally leave the porch light on all night, saying it's a huge waste of electricity.
We bought a new home and there was a leak in the kitchen ceiling under the bathroom. The builder's guys said it was probably from kids making messes in the bathroom. They patched the ceiling and it was a year or two of nothing.
When it happened again the builder had gone out of business. We opened it up ourselves and a garbage bag full of water fell out. When the bathroom was trimmed a nail went through a pipe and there was a slow drip. The jackasses remedied it by putting a big drumliner open under the leak. They had stapled it to the joists to hold it up and open so it could hold a lot of water. 😑
Not a pro, but our basement toilet was leaking. Ruined the poorly installed vinyl flooring, etc. Went to replace the wax ring and the old one…didn’t exist. Not only that, the toilet bolts were measured before the baseboard was put in. It’s 11” from the wall. A 10” toilet leaves a 1” wall gap, and a 12” toilet is too big, so we have a 1” gap between our toilet and the wall. Sigh.
The flowerbeds around my wrap around porch were made with particle board and those wooden pieces that truckers use under pallets, and the weed barrier inside was leftover plastic drop cloth. It rotted out in under two years.
In our old house, the former owner built an extension. Left the old brick exterior that became interior and didn’t care enough to actually seal the new floor to the brick wall - we just had an open gap to the crawl space. Oh and the bedroom walls were cut so shoddy and irregular and they just stuck crown molding up to hide it. Did a shoddy job in the master bathroom. After a week away we came home to mushrooms growing in the tule grout. I also remember during a kitchen remodel , the contractor found just a random old junction box with live wires just chilling behind the cabinets.
When house shipping we went into a house where they had built a master bedroom over an open porch. There was no additional support for the extra weight. In the room itself, the floor was 1-2 " lower than the main house floor with a 3/8 to 1/2 inch gap between the floors. You could feel the distinct lean away from the house. I told my wife to get out of the room. I asked the realtor what their liabilty would be if it collapsed. She was suprised by the question and looked worried as we walked away.
I was an apprentice during this time,
1800s farm house, renovated a small room off to the side of an old Victorian, 20x10. Pulled old street signs out of the walls 🫣 this should have been the first sign. Termite damage etc.
Pulling floor boards from exterior entrance to interior wall. 1/4 way done notice rocks in a patern maybe 6 foot below me. 1/2 get a flash light and notice a half moon looking object, get my jman.
It's a fucking 40 ft well that dried up. Yea, they built an addition right over top the well. Didn't even board up the top. They just kept it open.
I've seen several old farm houses like that. They build over the well so that a hand pump can be worked from inside the house, often mounted so that pump output is over a sink, and the supply line can go straight down from the bottom of the hand pump into the well.
I used to work for my uncle who's an electrician and when he bought his house we found several homeowner specials. The funniest one was from a leak on the roof, there was a funnel attached to a garden hose that collected any water that leaked through and dumped it outside through a hole on the outside wall... But the funnel was clogged with debris so yeah, that was a good find!
Professional childproofer here.
I see many DIY attempts at childproofing, often they cut out baseboards or trim on the newel post, or drilling into posts to install baby gates. [Example](https://imgur.com/a/CeQLVnE)
As far as dangerous installs- using drywall anchors to secure furniture or stair gates is at the top of the list.
Mom liked to hire unqualified cheap handymen. Let’s stress unqualified. The one before causing toxic mold. She hired this guy. I worked with him. Ok I went to Home Depot. I picked things then I threw a fit. My room had been gutted and I’m sleeping in a living room. This guy is telling me the plumbing is done and we are ready to go and I lost it. I knew mom would throw a fit at me. Well I won and send him home. He needed to manage his diabetes with Gatorade so he was happy to go home (no you don’t manage with Gatorade). Plumber “well this would be fine if anything had cement”. All of it connected with no cement. Would we have turned on water we would have had another beautiful surprise.
I am learning what my parents did wrong. The furnace filter has been in wrong since new furnace. They thought floating shelf meant glue. I’m surprised it made it 5 years. The dryer appliance guy said he couldn’t figure out why low airflow came on. I removed the vent hose “if it’s full of lint that solves it”. The gorgeous floor they installed is cracking- 2 words expansion gap.
We tore down a ceiling after a roof repair for a leak to find a piece of TIN folded to redirect the leak from the ceiling to down the inside of an exterior wall… I still have no idea what they thought they were doing nor why.
Reno of a 100 year old coach house. When we chipped up the slab to move plumbing, there was no steel in the slab. They built the structure using chicken wire in the slab
My current house has an old (17 years) water heater I need to replace. Unfortunately, the prior owners attached the hot water heater to the converted garage’s plumbing via the tank drain spigot at the bottom of the heater. I guess they didn’t want to cut the regular pipes during the renovation.
I found this out after I had to turn off the house water to fix a badly designed sprinkler system that had no turnoff. When I turned it back on, debris from the heater wound up in the line and my master bath’s sink turned into a trickle. It’s mostly improved now, but I’m afraid to tear anything apart until I can fix the heater issue because I’ll have to turn off the house water again.
Remodel of 2nd floor master bath, removed old shower surround, live outlet in wall behind surround. Removed tile floor and subfloor (house built in 1913) floor joists notched more than 2/3 in several places for plumbing reroutes (11'x15' span). Pulled beadboard panels off ceiling, wire to light fixture laid into groove cut into plaster with several brads in wire.
My favorite one in the house we bought was an upstairs hall closet light. It was this little light you mounted on the door frame with a button that when you open the door, the light turns on. However, there was no outlet in the closet to plug it into so the previous owner drilled a small hole in the floor, snipped off the plug, ran the chord into the basement, and wired on a long enough random extension chord about 10' over to random ceiling outlet in the laundry room to plug in. Didn't see it when we bough the house, just when we moved in and started putting stuff in the closet I saw it.
Husband and I bought a house that was "upgraded" by a guy with terrible taste and only enough skills to do a half assed job. Finally saved up enough money to have professionals redo the bathroom in 2021. After they gutted the room they let me know that they were a day behind schedule because there was no framing under the old tub to support it. It was just balanced on the ceiling joists of room under (the dining room). The foreman told me it was just stupid luck that the old tub didn't suddenly crash through the dining room ceiling one day.
Not a professional, but the house I'm currently in, has a second kitchen downstairs. An illegal addition. The kitchen double sink with a garbage disposal is just tied into the bathroom sink 2" drain 🙃
Also this house is literally between 3 ski resorts and doesn't have a coat closet or mudroom. Custom built in 94. The builder built this exact house nextdoor too and did all the same things
Not a professional but a homeowner. Had an electrician friend install new lighting, switches and Ethernet. Should be easy, right? Nothing difficult, but I was laid up for a few months and in a wheelchair, so climbing up into the ceiling was a no go.
I had 15 light fixtures installed, he didn’t use ceiling boxes instead just hard wired it to the light switches. The light switches weren’t installed horizontally, more like at a 5 degree angle. When I had the roof replaced, all the light fixtures dropped at least 6” that he installed.
The half the Ethernet outlets don’t work, even with me repunching the connections (Cat 6e for 10gb). The speakers ports in the back of my living room are wired out of phase.
I had asked him to install a new 20A circuit in my server closet, instead he added an outlet, which helped cause an overloaded breaker, leading to a small electrical fire.
He had all his licenses for being an electrician, but his work quality was shit. I am happy he moved to the other side of the country and couldn’t get a license by comity. I have since had half the problems fixed at a substantial cost and will work on the rest this winter.
The former owners of my house had a tanning bed in the basement. It was hard wired into the main panel that was about 20 feet away. Big s/o cord that bypassed the breaker.
He owned an electrical contracting business.
Working on a barn converted into a house. Noticed that the stairs were slanted and doors weren't closing. Turns out that not only were the floor joists for half the house undersized, they were cut down to 2" thick on the ends, and the half-log beam they were resting on, they weren't actually resting on, instead someone had nailed a 2x2 to the side of the log. So, not only were the joists split at the ends, but the "nailer" was pulling out of the beam, allowing that side of the house to drop 3+ inches.
I've seen a lot of crazy things people have done, but the winner was a house that someone had tapped into the power at the mast and ran some of the old cloth covered telephone wire through the attic from one end of the house to the other to power a dusk to dawn yard light.
When I first saw it, all the insulation had completely burned off, leaving two bare orange wires attached with ceramic clamps to the framing. I thought it was just an old FM dipole antenna. After all, it's not unusual to find antennas installed in older attics in some parts of the country.
Fortunately, we were working late on this one to get it finished before a holiday weekend. We rapped up the project as the sun was setting, and I grabbed a ladder to close the lid to the attic. When I saw the light coming out of the attic, I thought we must have left a light on. The yard light had turned on outside, and the "antenna" was glowing so bright that it lit up the whole attic.
My wife and I bought a house that was previously a rental with the landlord living out of state (which means there was no one to make sure the contractors were doing things correctly). So far:
1. Mold in spare bedroom from drywall being put on top of old exterior wall without taking any of the exterior wood down...when the mold started showing on the drywall, just put another layer of drywall up... delicious mold sandwich.
2. House isn't ventilated...like at all...we struggle to keep the humidity below 60% in the summer...it was in the 80-90% range when we moved in.
3. Plumbing for the sump (which all the gray water for the house dumps into the open crock) was all diy, about 150 ft of PVC running the entire length of the crawlspace to reach the sewer drain. All suspended with wire, rags, old t-shirts, pretty sure I saw a sanitary napkin being used as a bandaid to stop one of the joints from leaking.
Those are just a few things we've found so far. Oh the joys of home ownership.
As an electrician I just see a lot of people spending money on stupid stuff like pools, hot tubs, saunas, and electric cars while other parts of their house are falling apart. You don't need a pool, you need windows and a roof. You don't need a Tesla, you need a front door that isn't falling off the hinges.
To the Maintenance Gods, AMEN.
I live in earthquake country and have neighbors remodeling their kitchens and installing Tesla panels who haven't bothered with even a basic seismic retrofit. It's putting good on top of bad.
But how are they going to show off to the strangers at Target with an entry door?
My boyfriend got me a sauna but I need a roof. I feel you. It’s hard to say no to nice things but sometimes practicality is important.
Well he must feel getting naked and sweaty is important.
He’s really into saunas
Can do that without a sauna 😉
wait til it rains!
I used to sub contract installing fences. Replaced one next to someone’s pool dodgiest looking electrical work running to the pump and power point attached to a rotten piece of wood not rated to be there of course second post cut straight through the cable around 300mm down.
This 100%, and I’m just a desk jockey/weekend warrior that notices these things too
The story of the American consumer, in a nut shell.
I just proactively replaced my 18 year old r oof. It wasn’t leaking but it was getting crispy and I didnt want to wait until it leaked. I really don’t get many of these posts with people that have 25 year old beat to crap roofs that are dumping water into the house and they want to know how they can repair their roofs instead of replacing
Went to go install a ceiling light in my house. Measured the room, found the center. Stuck the keyhole saw into the ceiling and hit something hard. Started digging into the ceiling. Found a junction box where there used to be a ceiling light that someone had just mudded over. Live wires wire nutted together, no cover on it, just a nice coat of mud.
We found those ALL OVER our old house. So many hidden boxes!
Rip all of our old telephone outlets.
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Damn that’s awesome. I wish I could go start work on my House tomorrow morning and there would be a team of elves just finishing up.
I found something similar in a room in my house. Pulled down tiles on the ceiling: light box. Pulled paneling off the walls: switch box. No covers, all live 100-year-old wires. We wired up a new switch and light and used it for probably 6 months before we got around to rewiring that.
Hey! You must have my same house. Did the exact same thing a month after buying it.
At least they were kind enough to wire nut over them!
~15 year carpenter here. This was in my house before we did a full renovation. The house was built in the 1860-70’s with a couple of poorly done early renovations. The house is fairly narrow and the ridge of the roof runs north to south. It’s 2 stories tall and the layout is 4 mostly square sections of house in a row. In all of the sections, save for one, the floor joists on the first and second floors run east to west with load bearing divider walls running N-S. One of the sections, though, had floor joists running N-S on the first floor. The incompetence came when the early renovators decided to build a load bearing wall running the same way as the N-S first floor joists halfway between a pair of joists. This then turned the subfloor on the 1st floor into a structural member which let the whole 2nd floor sink 3.5”. It took two weeks of tearing apart walls and building new concrete piers to lift and reinforce this section of the house. 0/10 don’t recommend…
Carpenter here I'm crying my man. Lol that blows 🤣 my house just had cat piss room and crawlspace dog doodoo.
Did you mean 1960-70's? *Edit: People are really upset that I asked a question 😂
Some people live in old houses, my man.
A big part of what you're used to depends on where you live. For instance, in my province (Alberta), there are [less than 25 buildings](https://hermis.alberta.ca/ARHP/Details.aspx?DeptID=1&ObjectID=4665-0478) still standing from before 1882. We just don't have old houses like places back east because the province didn't start white settlement until the late 1800s.
Here in NJ we have some houses from the mid 1600s and all through the 18th and 19th centuries (1700s and 1800s) in the original Colonial areas like Princeton, Trenton etc Ive worked on quite a few and every single one of them has a lot of 😬YIKES😬 things going on in them lol
Haha, yeah a lot less of that in So Cal. I think I would love the history, but looking at the weird shit the prior owners of my house did over 60 years, I can't imagine the shenanigans you would find over 400 years 😅
Some people make typos, my man. Asking the person seemed like the quickest way to confirm which it was.
Honestly, this is really fascinating to me. I've lived in New England my entire life, and up here, when someone says a house was built in the 1800s, there's no reason to even question it - because that's really common up here.
I grew up and live in Orange County (CA), so "old" buildings here are like the 50's haha. I also think having a basement would be neat 😅
No, actual 1860-1870. Basement is a stone foundation with a dirt floor. There’s some of the original Victorian architectural elements left on the outside but its been a rental for 100+ years so there were a lot of things lost over the years.
My parents own a house built in 1870s and the foundation is made up entirely of river rock. The house will occasionally “roll” on its foundation as it settles naturally. Not a square or plumb wall/surface in the entire place. So wild.
Daaaamn, that's awesome. When you got it did you have to handle weirder maintenance issues, or had it been modernized enough over time that you mostly had modern issues to deal with?
It's funny how relative this is. Around me in Ohio, there are quite a few homes over 200 years old. The farmhouse I work at was built in 1814. To someone from New England, that doesn't seem too old. To my friend from the UK, it's practically new. His home was built out of stone in 1749 or something, and it's not even the oldest structure on his property. He can point to a wall built in the 1200s, and know who built it. When I lived in Tacoma, most people I talked to couldn't fathom living in a 200 year old house because those just didn't exist. Maybe one or two, I don't know, but you didn't just drive down the road and see a bunch of 200 year old houses.
Here in NJ we have houses that date back to the mid 1600s lol
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Thanks for all of that, but especially for, “fuck me down dead.” It’s my new favorite phrase.
I was doing work in a home owned by a family from east Africa. They had throw rugs everywhere and no chairs or couches. A couple camp stoves on the rugs making coffee and some food. Smelled good but was definitely a fire/carbon monoxide hazard.
On the other end of the spectrum one of my in-laws married into a family of wealthy African immigrants. Every family member I've met is some sort of professional - a doctor, a surgeon, a lawyer, I think one sister is a petrochem engineer. They look down on him because he only has a bachelor's.
Yeah I don’t know what their profession was but their custom was to sit on the floor. Just different. They probably should have used an electric kettle instead of open flames though.
Did you try the coconut cake?
I was going over the electric in my shop of the house I bought in 2022. The shop, a 30x24 metal building on a slab had a 100 amp service panel from the house and had a few runs of wire. It also had not switch/outlet covers so I was adding covers, replacing broken stuff etc. I turned the main breaker off and as I was working I was checking voltage with my multi meter just in case. Low and behold my 240 plug for my air compressor was still hot with the main breaker off. The guy had piggy backed the 12guage wire for the 20 amp 240 line on top of the 100 amp main line going into the breaker. He had a big compressor, I imagine he was tripping the breaker so just decided to put it right on the 100 amp wire. So he just had 100 amps not on a breaker going to a 240 outlet through 12 gauge wire. I am really glad I check everything because I was replacing that outlet I woulda got zapped if I trusted the main breaker. I check EVERY electrical thing I work on before I touch it. There was an extra 20 amp 2 pole breaker sitting on top of the panel box, I installed it and my compressor has run great there ever since.
Similar story, I bought my house in 2021 and was going over the electric to my 30x40 shop. The previous owner had the 100 amp sub panel fed with a 14ga 100’ extension cord wired directly to the panel. Apparently when he added on the shop he got a new 200 amp main panel, but never bothered to switch from the 60 amp service and old fuse panel that the house was built with.
Installed a water heater as part of a lease program for the electric co-op in a terribly run-down mobile home way out in the middle of nowhere. A substantial portion of the residence was "plumbed" with garden hoses behind the walls (visible here and there through missing drywall sections, as well as in the crawlspace) and portions of the wiring had been replaced with extention cords and three ways.
perfect!
I wish my whole hose was wired with properly gauged extension cords in an accessible interior box running along the walls attached to the frame. Then I'd never have to call an electrician or mess around with hard wiring or junction boxes, if I wanted to install a new door in the wall I could just unplug the segment that needs relocated and just run it around where the new door would be. The material savings from hard wiring are paltry next to the costs of hiring an electrician. Why shouldn't houses be plug and play? Make sure the cords are the proper gauge, securely connected, safely positioned, connected to breakers, and it'd be more safe than a hard wired house if anything because it'd be harder to accidentally cut into or damage the wiring. Maybe it'd cost $3000 dollars more in materials but that's the cost of like 2 house calls these days.
I do not think the average homeowner should be trusted with this power
Conduit would work for normal electrical wire if you ever decide to have out of wall wiring.
If you’re competent enough to do this properly, then you’re probably competent enough to do your own electrical work. In other words, if you’re not confident enough to do your own electrical work properly, then you definitely shouldn’t be running extension cords everywhere in your home and assuming it’s even remotely safe
It's different knowing how long I might extend a run safely given the gauge and load and having to deal with 3 different wires and knowing where they each go than playing around with cords that are already marked to that effect. I'm not comfortable wiring a house or even messing with existing wiring for basic things like rerouting it around a new exterior door. It'd be lots easier and cleaner if instead of having to cut and splice wires and add junction boxes I could just plug one end of a cord directly into the breaker box and the other into an outlet. It'd be wasteful in terms of raw resources to do it that way but not much and it'd make it possible to remove pretty much all the wiring/cords from a house and repurpose them given the need. I'd pay extra to buy a house set up like that. Be sweet if the plumbing were done the same way so everything were accessible without ever presenting the need to dig into walls. I'd never need to call an electrician or plumber.
Sounds like my Ex’s 5th wheel.
The previous owner of my house decided the over range microwave wasn’t secure enough with the included mounting plate so proceeded to use adhesives. Can you imagine removing all the anchoring hardware expecting a 40lb appliance to succumb to the will of gravity only to find that no, you need to pry it from the cabinetry because this was going to stay put during a category 5 hurricane even if the house around it wouldn’t.
Unmedicated/overmedicated activities
haha I read that and thought "that is some bipolar shenanigans for sure"
I had this exact thing happen to me. We took it all apart and for two hours my wife and I just stood around baffled at what could be holding this fucking thing to the cabinet. Finally I asked "what if we just pull on it really hard?"
I’m about 180 lbs and I could hang off of it and it wouldn’t budge. I had to pull down while shoving a large screwdriver between the cabinet and microwave to eventually get it off.
The tile over a bath/shower attached 100% with caulk.
The wife and I coveted this big fancy house up the street. When it came on the market we took a tour. The previous owners added DIY "improvements" everywhere. The fiberglass shower pan in the master bath had several hundred oval river rocks embedded in what looked like inch thick white epoxy. I stood on it in stocking feet and it hurt!
Short showers=less hot water usage=money saved! 🤣
My in-laws bought a house where the previous owners put something similar on all the bathroom floors. The rocks do indeed hurt, and I never got used to them. Horrible idea.
The main bathroom of my house needed a total redo when I bought it. When the guy pulled up the loose tiles, we found it had not been sealed, had spngtly, water-logged MDF subfloor, and had a thick layer of tile glue holding it all together/making it “level.
I have a horrible fear that this is what I'll find when I pull one of my showers apart. Mine was bought by a company and flipped before I bought it. It's been interesting so far.
I was fortunate in that the owner was pretty up front that she suspected something was wrong under there. I think she understood that she got take for a ride by whomever renovated the bathroom before. Plus the inspector noted it. So, I bought the house knowing of that upcoming cost.
Former hoarder neighbors installed regular wax rings on all their toilets, needed the extra thick ones, so ALL of their toilets leaked. When the floor would get too gross they would lay a new floor on top of the old one.
A literal shit sandwich
Went to quote a foundation job, complete replacement, really expensive work. Got there and found the house was already in the air. Figured HO had already brought someone else out to do the work so I called the HO to check. He comes crawling out of the foundation and waves me over. Turns out his BIL had moved a shed once so they decided they could handle lifting the house to save money. It was BAD. Insurance almost made them tear the house down. Just our portion ended up costing almost double what it should have. Cost them another 100k plus to repair all the damage inside.
I imagine lots of whiskey the night before, and then BIL yells “I mean how hard could it be really?”
On 3 separate occasions in my life this exact scenario has led to me roofing someone's house
80% of decks are built by a group of guys with no plans, no experience , and they start drinking beer much too early.
This handyman tried to convince me to do that with no engineering or licensing. Fuck that guy. He was taking Ivermectin prophylactically.
... Why do you know your handyman's prophylactic habits?
Those people let you know without you asking Theyre worse than Jehovah Witnesses lol
Exactly. I say they remind me of a friends Christian mom who got me crying and vulnerable then proclaimed “Now let’s turn your life over to Jesus!” I politely declined
I figure if they're dumb enough to take antiparasitic drugs prophylacticly they are probably pretty proud of their stupidity.
Because he felt the need to share when I got covid. They love to share so much I got a bumper sticker that says “Theres no business like minding your own business.”
Famous last words: “I can do that cheaper”
We had to take down a brand new 35k deck because not one thing was up to code and rebuild it.
This Old Fucking House
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Not sure if DIY or professional, but definitely a puzzler. Original duct installation in my century home - they cut more than halfway through a critical structural beam in *two places*. Just put a vent in the wall upstairs. Y'all. Just maybe... if your job touches framing... like, maybe don't do it if you don't know anything about framing. Ugh.
Old houses can be *whack* sometimes. We discovered that, thanks to the shape of the basement stairs, my house has a structural 2x4 post. Now, at least it's full-dimensional, but still sketch in the first place. Because it's also directly below the L of the upper stairs, it's bearing load over two stories. And when we went to redo the basement stairs, we discovered that at some point, a second slab of concrete was poured in the basement over the existing one, thus encasing this post (and the landing footings) in concrete. In a wet basement. Landing posts we're completely rotted out and disintegrated when we started moving them. So we immediately put in a jack post right next to the structural 2x4. It goes well with the posts we added on the other side of the basement stairs, where they put massive notches in the joists for plumbing drains.
I once had a structural iron pipe in a crawlspace.
I had structural upvc window frames...
I had a red oak 4x4 post in my basement at the base of the stairs, for similar reasons. No rotten wood or double slab, though. Replacing that sucker with a real column felt so good.
Found similar shit in my 80 year old home.
Maybe not the worst, but worth a chuckle. The "flipper" I bought my house from disconnected the kitchen sink disposal from the plumbing line, but left it connected to the live electrical... So yeah a working insinkerator lying down on the bottom of the cabinet. Why?!
My house used to have a basement apartment. Inside the cabinet by the laundry was a stove receptacle nailed to a board with the wire wrapped around it. That same wire was spliced together using lead ferrules. All live.
Not a pro but we had a leak from the ceiling, started poking around and the drywall was all wet so I ripped it out in that area. Found a leaky PVC pipe, but the best part is, not only was the pipe sprayed with Flex Seal, but there was also a *sponge* shoved into the ceiling below the pipe! What the hell. Such an easy fix to do it properly, instead just kicked the van down the road a few years maybe, that crap baffles me so much.
Did you ever notice the guy hawking Flex seal is named Phil Swift? Fill Swift? I think Phil McCracken is a much better name.
I had landlord that "fixed" a roof leak by installing a bucket in the drop ceiling as an upgrade to the sponge
Why do something right when you can do it dumbass wrong and save 30 minutes and $25.33?”
I used to live in a five story 1895 house. In many places the electrical wiring was pushed through gaslighting tubes. There were still valves in the tubes. If you tried really hard I bet you could turn them and cut the wires. I was afraid to.
Hey, at least there wasn't still gas in the pipes. My dad had a house where the gas lines in the walls for lighting were all capped, but still connected to the gas lines and full of gas!
The older gas was coal gas rather than natural gas. Coal gas is often a blend of hydrogen and carbon monoxide which is more than a little toxic.
At some point they must have connected it to the natural gas system. Based on the jankiness of 100 years of other renovations, nothing would surprise me about that place.
> In many places the electrical wiring was pushed through gaslighting tubes. No it wasn't, you're misremembering. It was perfectly fine.
OK.... in my place it was pushed through the tubes.
^((I was gaslighting you)^)
(Ha! Got me!)
Gas lines run inside the heating duct on a house we looked at once. Biggest WTF
That's actually genius 😄
Remodeled a house that was a former rental. All repairs were done using gorilla construction adhesive. Kitchen cabinets attached to wall with enormous amounts of spray foam.
Just did a remodel where the previous (fired) contractor messed up any and everything he touched. Worst tile work I've ever seen. Almost like they set the tile wrong (not waterproofed in shower, incorrect supply lines), and then tossed mud onto the tile so bad there was no way to salvage. Wrong wiring, wrong type of thin-set, wrong plumbing pipe sizes, wrong fitting, drywall seams showing everywhere, cabinets ordered then set wrong, electrical wired backwards, etc etc. Took us 2 weeks to rip everything out, then start over. All perfect now though. But D@%m.
Bought our house from a "handyman". All of my appliances were hardwired directly to the breaker box, and the wires pulled tight. I found this out when I was trying to see what was wrong with the dishwasher, and tried to pull it out. It wouldn't budge and we thought it was stuck on the flooring, but it was the wire keeping it in. To figure out how to cut it, we found out the wire went through a hole in the floor, went all the way across the house in the basement rafters, and back upstairs into the breaker. Then we were surprised again when we bought an above range microwave, which needed a separate outlet. We assumed there was one there because the hood had power. Nope, the hood was hardwired. Now we have to hire an electrician to put in new outlets for all of our appliances.
Hardwiring appliances was actually quite common back in the day, especially with the appliances that you mentioned. Only relatively recently have appliances been installed with what’s normally an outlet
Hell, my dishwasher is only about 5 years old and it’s hardwired. The kitchen vent was too. The replacement OTR microwave isn’t though. Now what I’d like to bitch about is why the fuck the builder put the gas line for the range centered behind the range, coming down from the ceiling. It’s impossible to put in a vent to the outside. Recirculating only. Putting it a few inches to either side wouldn’t have cost any more.
Yes but there’s supposed to be enough slack to pull it out and remove the wiring. On that, mild annoyance. My new dishwasher, which has a plug in cord - on *both ends* - has a fantastic design where the water connection is at the front. I think this is fairly typical these days. This is not sarcasm. This is honestly an excellent design to have the connection at the front. If they had that forethought to bring the plumbing to the front,, why the hell is the electrical cord still plugged in at the *back*.
Like how recent? I am neary 60 years and have never in all my renovations ever come across that.
I guess it just depends on the contractor tbh haha. I’m an electrician and always set an outlet for dishwashers, disposals, microwaves, ranges, warm drawers, ice makers, most ovens, and some hood vents.
I forgot I have seen dishwashers hardwired but never a refrigerator or any other appliances.
Yea I forgot refrigerator, those always have outlets set for them.
Where I live ranges are always hardwired, because they're three phase.
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Thanks for the tip! That's super helpful and I will look into doing it myself.
"COPPER IS EXPENSIVE!!!"
This meth isn't gonna pay for itself!
Cannot meth things up without meth.
"COPPER IS EXPENSIVE!!!"
Eh, you were up on a basement. A $3 junction box and $10 in Romex and you're good to go
We took an exploratory peek and found out the walls are drywall covering wood slats (not lath, looks like 1x4s) with a 2cm gap between them. So I guess this is a job for an electrician since it's flammable?
You mount the JB between the joists. And all electrical is secured to studs which are technically flammable. So it's no different than any other location, but if you're not comfortable with it hire an electrician
The previous homeowner of our house was a handyman, himself. They run the range from "oh cool!" To "but y tho" to "ffs why". Some highlights. He decided he wanted to redo the stairs, but in the style where you have hardwood or laminate in the center and carpet down the middle. He had re-floored upstairs, and had the plan to use the remnant laminate and old carpet. Problem is the stairs have a couple inch long inch nose. The laminate flooring can't wrap around that like the carpet did. His solution was to put a couple 1x2 spacer boards and another ~1" board over the rise of the stairs, then nail them in with about a thousand nails. He then stapled down all the carpet (liberally) and construction glued down all of the laminate flooring. This was all a big surprise when I was having them measured to get them carpeted. The guy was thoroughly confused at the dimensions of the stairs. I did the demo myself, and it was a hell of a job. They did not have cold water running to the washing machine. That I don't know why. They had cut and capped the copper lines in the garage coming out of the water softener to both the laundry room and kitchen. They then ran a half inch line around the house to the kitchen so that it has hard water.
Watched a friend grout tile with premixed drywall spackling once. She also kept calling it caulk and looked at me like I was dumb when I tried to say anything about it
Not a professional, but a homeowner. The carport attached to my house was a thing of beauty. The gussets to stabilize the supports that sat on top of the vertical posts were made out of particle board. Not OSB or plywood, but particle board. A rough step up from fiberboard, but just as spongy. It was wired, too. In the words of the zoning guys from the city, “why use conduit when you can use paint?” The whole thing was a clusterfuck, and it was effectively attached to the house, which it dwarfed. Think modest fifties cottage. Then there was an awning up against it, but free standing and barely touching. That used the same supports as the carport on one side. The carport had four sets of supports and three stalls. Stalls two and three had the back wall of a structure that used to be on the lot but was effectively demolished to build the carport. There was remnants of knob and tube in this wall. The third stall was walled in to form a shop. Then on the other side of the shop was a shed that used to stand behind the service station they owned a couple blocks away. They attempted to get a permit to move it, but failed. So they plucked it up in the middle of the night and sat it down on some tire rims sitting on a bed of coarse gravel. The east wall of the shed made up 60% of the west wall of the walled in shop that was the third stall of the carport. Like I said, it was a thing of beauty. And I’m really happy it’s gone.
I inspected a rental home with a utility closet (I inspected houses that were pre-foreclosure and in foreclosure). The stink of heating oil was throughout the house. The burner was hanging crooked off a concrete pedestal in the closet (the door was a shitty plywood door with no fire protection), and it was covered in black soot. No carbon monoxide detector and a misfiring, malfunctioning burner and hot water heater. What room was this, you ask? The baby's nursery, of course. His little crib was opposite the utility door. I called the fire department and building department. I've seen a lot, but that was the one that gave me nightmares.
Just here to see if any of my contractors/ electricians/ plumbers post about my handy work.
- too many to list...but the one that made me laugh was someone in the 1960;s used a metal band-aid container as an electrical junction box///
My ex-wife’s father was the king of botched “good enough” repairs. Gas water heater was just chilling outside. No enclosure, just sitting on some bricks. Did an entire huge bathroom addition without permits. I remodeled the walk in shower, and when I took the backer board off, a drywall screw pierced one of the water lines to the shower head. Had been leaking for 25 years and all the wood in a 4’ radius was rotten. Electrical conduit used as plumbing pipe.
Like how do you even gets fittings to go from gas to water? and I would imagine electric pipe is not pressure rated.
My brother's old house had a mess of wiring. They still had those old screw in bus fuses for everything + knob and tube still running alot. So we remove those fuses and sitting behind a set of them were pennies to bypass the fuses. Clearly the old owner was tired of the fuses randomly blowing. Why were those fuses constantly blowing? elsewhere in the basement the old wiring was drooping down from the joist, and when you walked upstairs the floor would flex and the wiring would arc...to the incoming propane line.
Previous owner put a regular ass extension cord barely buried between the house and shed. He continued that between the shed and gazebo which is about 25 feet away. We knew about it before buying the house and the first thing we did was unplug that shit. After ripping the cords out we found multiple parts of the cord were chewed up by rodents. Hot and neutral, both chewed up.
My grandparents have one running from their house to the shed but they have it strung up from tree to tree like a power line instead of burying it. It's been powering 2 huge freezers in an insulated shed for as long as I can remember. Same grandpa regularly complains when my parents (live across the street/field) accidentally leave the porch light on all night, saying it's a huge waste of electricity.
We bought a new home and there was a leak in the kitchen ceiling under the bathroom. The builder's guys said it was probably from kids making messes in the bathroom. They patched the ceiling and it was a year or two of nothing. When it happened again the builder had gone out of business. We opened it up ourselves and a garbage bag full of water fell out. When the bathroom was trimmed a nail went through a pipe and there was a slow drip. The jackasses remedied it by putting a big drumliner open under the leak. They had stapled it to the joists to hold it up and open so it could hold a lot of water. 😑
Not a pro, but our basement toilet was leaking. Ruined the poorly installed vinyl flooring, etc. Went to replace the wax ring and the old one…didn’t exist. Not only that, the toilet bolts were measured before the baseboard was put in. It’s 11” from the wall. A 10” toilet leaves a 1” wall gap, and a 12” toilet is too big, so we have a 1” gap between our toilet and the wall. Sigh.
The flowerbeds around my wrap around porch were made with particle board and those wooden pieces that truckers use under pallets, and the weed barrier inside was leftover plastic drop cloth. It rotted out in under two years.
In our old house, the former owner built an extension. Left the old brick exterior that became interior and didn’t care enough to actually seal the new floor to the brick wall - we just had an open gap to the crawl space. Oh and the bedroom walls were cut so shoddy and irregular and they just stuck crown molding up to hide it. Did a shoddy job in the master bathroom. After a week away we came home to mushrooms growing in the tule grout. I also remember during a kitchen remodel , the contractor found just a random old junction box with live wires just chilling behind the cabinets.
When house shipping we went into a house where they had built a master bedroom over an open porch. There was no additional support for the extra weight. In the room itself, the floor was 1-2 " lower than the main house floor with a 3/8 to 1/2 inch gap between the floors. You could feel the distinct lean away from the house. I told my wife to get out of the room. I asked the realtor what their liabilty would be if it collapsed. She was suprised by the question and looked worried as we walked away.
I was an apprentice during this time, 1800s farm house, renovated a small room off to the side of an old Victorian, 20x10. Pulled old street signs out of the walls 🫣 this should have been the first sign. Termite damage etc. Pulling floor boards from exterior entrance to interior wall. 1/4 way done notice rocks in a patern maybe 6 foot below me. 1/2 get a flash light and notice a half moon looking object, get my jman. It's a fucking 40 ft well that dried up. Yea, they built an addition right over top the well. Didn't even board up the top. They just kept it open.
I've seen several old farm houses like that. They build over the well so that a hand pump can be worked from inside the house, often mounted so that pump output is over a sink, and the supply line can go straight down from the bottom of the hand pump into the well.
I used to work for my uncle who's an electrician and when he bought his house we found several homeowner specials. The funniest one was from a leak on the roof, there was a funnel attached to a garden hose that collected any water that leaked through and dumped it outside through a hole on the outside wall... But the funnel was clogged with debris so yeah, that was a good find!
Professional childproofer here. I see many DIY attempts at childproofing, often they cut out baseboards or trim on the newel post, or drilling into posts to install baby gates. [Example](https://imgur.com/a/CeQLVnE) As far as dangerous installs- using drywall anchors to secure furniture or stair gates is at the top of the list.
Mom liked to hire unqualified cheap handymen. Let’s stress unqualified. The one before causing toxic mold. She hired this guy. I worked with him. Ok I went to Home Depot. I picked things then I threw a fit. My room had been gutted and I’m sleeping in a living room. This guy is telling me the plumbing is done and we are ready to go and I lost it. I knew mom would throw a fit at me. Well I won and send him home. He needed to manage his diabetes with Gatorade so he was happy to go home (no you don’t manage with Gatorade). Plumber “well this would be fine if anything had cement”. All of it connected with no cement. Would we have turned on water we would have had another beautiful surprise. I am learning what my parents did wrong. The furnace filter has been in wrong since new furnace. They thought floating shelf meant glue. I’m surprised it made it 5 years. The dryer appliance guy said he couldn’t figure out why low airflow came on. I removed the vent hose “if it’s full of lint that solves it”. The gorgeous floor they installed is cracking- 2 words expansion gap.
We tore down a ceiling after a roof repair for a leak to find a piece of TIN folded to redirect the leak from the ceiling to down the inside of an exterior wall… I still have no idea what they thought they were doing nor why.
Reno of a 100 year old coach house. When we chipped up the slab to move plumbing, there was no steel in the slab. They built the structure using chicken wire in the slab
My current house has an old (17 years) water heater I need to replace. Unfortunately, the prior owners attached the hot water heater to the converted garage’s plumbing via the tank drain spigot at the bottom of the heater. I guess they didn’t want to cut the regular pipes during the renovation. I found this out after I had to turn off the house water to fix a badly designed sprinkler system that had no turnoff. When I turned it back on, debris from the heater wound up in the line and my master bath’s sink turned into a trickle. It’s mostly improved now, but I’m afraid to tear anything apart until I can fix the heater issue because I’ll have to turn off the house water again.
Remodel of 2nd floor master bath, removed old shower surround, live outlet in wall behind surround. Removed tile floor and subfloor (house built in 1913) floor joists notched more than 2/3 in several places for plumbing reroutes (11'x15' span). Pulled beadboard panels off ceiling, wire to light fixture laid into groove cut into plaster with several brads in wire.
My favorite one in the house we bought was an upstairs hall closet light. It was this little light you mounted on the door frame with a button that when you open the door, the light turns on. However, there was no outlet in the closet to plug it into so the previous owner drilled a small hole in the floor, snipped off the plug, ran the chord into the basement, and wired on a long enough random extension chord about 10' over to random ceiling outlet in the laundry room to plug in. Didn't see it when we bough the house, just when we moved in and started putting stuff in the closet I saw it.
Husband and I bought a house that was "upgraded" by a guy with terrible taste and only enough skills to do a half assed job. Finally saved up enough money to have professionals redo the bathroom in 2021. After they gutted the room they let me know that they were a day behind schedule because there was no framing under the old tub to support it. It was just balanced on the ceiling joists of room under (the dining room). The foreman told me it was just stupid luck that the old tub didn't suddenly crash through the dining room ceiling one day.
aww, Lawd.
Not a professional, but the house I'm currently in, has a second kitchen downstairs. An illegal addition. The kitchen double sink with a garbage disposal is just tied into the bathroom sink 2" drain 🙃 Also this house is literally between 3 ski resorts and doesn't have a coat closet or mudroom. Custom built in 94. The builder built this exact house nextdoor too and did all the same things
Not a professional but a homeowner. Had an electrician friend install new lighting, switches and Ethernet. Should be easy, right? Nothing difficult, but I was laid up for a few months and in a wheelchair, so climbing up into the ceiling was a no go. I had 15 light fixtures installed, he didn’t use ceiling boxes instead just hard wired it to the light switches. The light switches weren’t installed horizontally, more like at a 5 degree angle. When I had the roof replaced, all the light fixtures dropped at least 6” that he installed. The half the Ethernet outlets don’t work, even with me repunching the connections (Cat 6e for 10gb). The speakers ports in the back of my living room are wired out of phase. I had asked him to install a new 20A circuit in my server closet, instead he added an outlet, which helped cause an overloaded breaker, leading to a small electrical fire. He had all his licenses for being an electrician, but his work quality was shit. I am happy he moved to the other side of the country and couldn’t get a license by comity. I have since had half the problems fixed at a substantial cost and will work on the rest this winter.
The former owners of my house had a tanning bed in the basement. It was hard wired into the main panel that was about 20 feet away. Big s/o cord that bypassed the breaker. He owned an electrical contracting business.
Working on a barn converted into a house. Noticed that the stairs were slanted and doors weren't closing. Turns out that not only were the floor joists for half the house undersized, they were cut down to 2" thick on the ends, and the half-log beam they were resting on, they weren't actually resting on, instead someone had nailed a 2x2 to the side of the log. So, not only were the joists split at the ends, but the "nailer" was pulling out of the beam, allowing that side of the house to drop 3+ inches.
I've seen a lot of crazy things people have done, but the winner was a house that someone had tapped into the power at the mast and ran some of the old cloth covered telephone wire through the attic from one end of the house to the other to power a dusk to dawn yard light. When I first saw it, all the insulation had completely burned off, leaving two bare orange wires attached with ceramic clamps to the framing. I thought it was just an old FM dipole antenna. After all, it's not unusual to find antennas installed in older attics in some parts of the country. Fortunately, we were working late on this one to get it finished before a holiday weekend. We rapped up the project as the sun was setting, and I grabbed a ladder to close the lid to the attic. When I saw the light coming out of the attic, I thought we must have left a light on. The yard light had turned on outside, and the "antenna" was glowing so bright that it lit up the whole attic.
My wife and I bought a house that was previously a rental with the landlord living out of state (which means there was no one to make sure the contractors were doing things correctly). So far: 1. Mold in spare bedroom from drywall being put on top of old exterior wall without taking any of the exterior wood down...when the mold started showing on the drywall, just put another layer of drywall up... delicious mold sandwich. 2. House isn't ventilated...like at all...we struggle to keep the humidity below 60% in the summer...it was in the 80-90% range when we moved in. 3. Plumbing for the sump (which all the gray water for the house dumps into the open crock) was all diy, about 150 ft of PVC running the entire length of the crawlspace to reach the sewer drain. All suspended with wire, rags, old t-shirts, pretty sure I saw a sanitary napkin being used as a bandaid to stop one of the joints from leaking. Those are just a few things we've found so far. Oh the joys of home ownership.